Description

The second installment in Jasper Fforde's New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England--from the author of Early Riser

The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with New York Times bestselling author Jasper Fforde's magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction--the police force inside the BookWorld. She is apprenticed to the man-hating Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations, who grudgingly shows Thursday the ropes. And she gains just enough skill to get herself in a real mess entering the pages of Poe's "The Raven." What she really wants is to get Landen back. But this latest mission is not without further complications. Along with jumping into the works of Kafka and Austen, and even Beatrix Potter's The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Thursday finds herself the target of a series of potentially lethal coincidences, the authenticator of a newly discovered play by the Bard himself, and the only one who can prevent an unidentifiable pink sludge from engulfing all life on Earth. It's another genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment for fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse. Thursday's zany investigations continue with The Well of Lost Plots.show more

Table of contents

Lost in a Good Book1. The Adrian Lush Show
2. The Speical Operations Network
3. Cardenio Unbound
4. Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Neanderthal
5. Vanishing Hitchhikers
4a. Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Thursday Next
6. Family
7. White Horse, Uffington, Picnics, for the Use of
8. Mr. Stiggins and SO-1
9. The More Things Stay the Same
10. A Lack of Differences
11. Granny Next
12. At Home with My Memories
13. Mount Pleasant
14. The Gravitube™
15. Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka
16. Interview with the Cat
17. Miss Havisham
18. The Trial of Fräulein N
19. Bargain Books
20. Yorrick Kaine
21. Les Artes Modernes de Swindon '85
22. Travels with My Father
23. Fun with Spike
24. Performance-Related Pay, Miles Hawke & Norland Park
25. Roll Call at Jurisfiction
26. Assignment One: Bloophole Filled in Great Expectations
27. Landen and Joffy Again
28. "The Raven"
29. Rescued
30. Cardenio Rebound
31. Dream Topping
32. The End of Life As We Know It
33. The Dawn of Life as We Know It
34. The Well of Lost Plotsshow more

Review quote

"Lost [in a Good Book] is even more richly crammed with jokes, ideas and action. Brainier silliness is hard to find. A-."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Fforde [has a] head-spinning narrative agility. His novel is satire, fantasy, literary criticism, thriller, whodunit, game, puzzle, joke, postmodern prank and tilt-a-whirl. Okay, maybe Lost in a Good Book is a creature with more than the usual number of feet. But it's exceptionally light on all of them . . . [Fforde] is irrepressible good company"
--The Washington Post

"Just what the doctor ordered now, in a world under the shadow of war, at the tail end of a long, cold winter . . . Lost in a Good Book resembles whipped cream--as sweet and light as the promise of spring."
--Salon.com

"Entertainingly surreal. Perhaps even more clever than its predecessor [The Eyre Affair], the new story offers a plot stuffed with enough coincidences and characters to make Dickens proud."
--Orlando Sentinel

"The book-jumping high jinks continue in Fforde's equally whimsical Lost in a Good Book . . . its mix of surrealism, satire and adventure proves to be totally absorbing."
--Time Out New York

"Fforde's wicked sense of humor and wide-ranging intelligence make every page a joy."
--The New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Fforde packs Lost in a Good Book to the rafters with sophisticated literary allusions, numerous interweaving subplots and wildly imaginative details. It's obvious from the way he leaves things that Fforde has many more adventures in mind for his heroine; and with so many classics to choose from, Thursday will have plenty of allies on her side."
--The Seattle Times

"If Thursday's adventures prove nothing else, it is that reading can be wonderfully exciting, a lot of fun, and a welcome, maybe necessary, distraction from our quotidian cares."
--The Philadelphia Inquirershow more

About Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring vacantly out of the window and arranging words on a page. He lives and writes in Wales. The Eyre Affair was his first novel in the bestselling series of Thursday Next novels, which includes Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and The Woman Who Died A Lot. The series has more than one million copies (and counting) in print. He is also the author of The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear of the Nursery Crime series, Shades of Grey, and books for young readers, including The Last Dragonslayer. Visit jasperfforde.com.show more

Rating details

42,291 ratings

4.13 out of 5 stars

5
36% (15,371)

4
44% (18,583)

3
17% (7,234)

2
2% (901)

1
0% (202)

Book ratings by Goodreads

Goodreads
is the world's largest site for readers with over 50 million reviews. We're featuring millions of their reader ratings on our book pages to help you find your new favourite book.
Close
X